Hard on the heels of the White House's new report about artificial intelligence's potential to address major societal challenges, NVIDIA will be holding Washington's largest ever AI conference. GTC DC will feature some of the most prominent leaders in government and industry when it takes place Oct. 26-27, at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington. The event is the latest in a series of GPU Technology Conferences, which have attracted 16,000 people so far this year across Silicon Valley, Europe and Asia. The timing is right for policymakers and AI experts to meet, following yesterday's White House report concluding that "AI has the potential to help address some of the biggest challenges that society faces" and recommending increased funding in AI research to fuel economic growth. The report, Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence, published by the National Science and Technology Council, notes that "the effectiveness of government itself is being increased as agencies build their capacity to use AI to carry out their missions more quickly, responsively and efficiently."

"As digitization and machine intelligence continues to proliferate and get pervasive, the need for customer intimacy, transparency, and security of data are becoming essential to next generation business networks," said Nij Chawla, Chief Product Officer of CognitiveScale. "CognitiveScale is one of the first companies to combine Blockchain, big data, and machine learning for industry-specific outcomes that power the next-generation Internet of Trust." CognitiveScale provides two products called ENGAGE and AMPLIFY that use machine intelligence to transform customer experience at the edge of the business and deploy self-learning, self-assuring business processes at the core. The company's product portfolio has been enhanced in the past year to address an evolving market, where trust, relevance, and assurance are becoming increasingly integrated and business critical. CognitiveScale will use Blockchain technology to underpin its products to put additional "smarts" in Blockchain smart contracts for multiple industries and processes, including financial services, healthcare, and procurement.

On March 12 2016, children in Malawi look on amazed in the community demonstration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs or drones) flying in Lilongwe. The Ministry of Health and UNICEF launched the first six-mile auto programmed flight in a trial to speed up the testing and diagnosis of HIV in infants. It can take hours to travel even short distances along the ramshackle dirt roads of Malawi, an impoverished African country with high rates of HIV, a virus that has taken a particularly acute toll on children. With limited trips from remote towns and villages – where large swaths of the populace live – to one of country's sparsely scattered hospitals in the capital city of Lilongwe, where they get essential medical services, testing for the virus can be an arduous task. But a new experiment conducted this year by United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) shows the potential for drones to help change that scenario amid debates over ethical issues and at a time when developing countries around the world are increasingly turning to the aerial devices to assist with humanitarian efforts.

The Afghan Taliban has uploaded a drone footage showing a suicide bomber driving into a police base and blowing it up in the southern Helmand province. The fighters say the footage proves that they can now deploy drones as an "addition to their sophisticated possessions of advanced technologies". The 23-minute-long video, which begins with a self-proclaimed suicide bomber speaking in front of an explosives-rigged Humvee, was released on Saturday appears to be authentic, according to the Afghan defence ministry. "The remote-controlled drones to capture footage of their [Taliban] fighters conducting attacks is nothing but to instill fear among people and to indicate how far they can get in defeating us, but in fact, using a drone is not something they can call an achievement," Dawlat Waziri, spokesman for the defence ministry, told Al Jazeera by telephone. "You can get a drone anywhere, in any shop. They found or bought one, and used it."

This is the second blog posts on the reinforcement learning. In this project we will demonstrate how to use the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm (DDPG) with Keras together to play TORCS (The Open Racing Car Simulator), a very interesting AI racing game and research platform. As a typical child growing up in Hong Kong, I do like watching cartoon movies. One of my favorite movies is called GPX Cyber Formula. It is an anime series about Formula racing in the future, a time when the race cars are equipped with super-intelligent AI computer system called "Cyber Systems".

"On August 29, 2027, at 2:14 PM EST, Skynet, the largest and the most successful financial corporation in the world, conducted an IPO on NASDAQ. As the only human left on staff, the corporate lawyer had to ring the bell. All management positions in the corporation are now held by robots." Does this sound like the trailer of a new Terminator film? In fact, it's only a matter of time before this becomes a reality.

Prior distributions of binarized natural images are learned by using a Boltzmann machine. According the results of this study, there emerges a structure with two sublattices in the interactions, and the nearest-neighbor and next-nearest-neighbor interactions correspondingly take two discriminative values, which reflects the individual characteristics of the three sets of pictures that we process. Meanwhile, in a longer spatial scale, a longer-range, although still rapidly decaying, ferromagnetic interaction commonly appears in all cases. The characteristic length scale of the interactions is universally up to approximately four lattice spacings $\xi \approx 4$. These results are derived by using the mean-field method, which effectively reduces the computational time required in a Boltzmann machine. An improved mean-field method called the Bethe approximation also gives the same results, as well as the Monte Carlo method does for small size images. These reinforce the validity of our analysis and findings. Relations to criticality, frustration, and simple-cell receptive fields are also discussed.

Arshad Khan, an ethnic Pashtun, was spotted selling tea at a market in Islamabad by @jiahali. The 18-year-old's piercing blue eyes and good looks captured Pakistan's attention and he landed a modelling contract, but it sparked an ardent debate on class, objectification, and the place of ethnic Pashtuns in society.

With Stephen Hawking opening an AI lab it's only a matter of time before smart robots take over for humans in the factory, on the battlefield, in the supermarket, and behind the counter. There's an old Chinese saying: "If you want to do anything good, easy and fast, you need connections," said Nancy Yang, a spokesperson for the fourth annual Seattle Biz-Tech Summit meeting today in Bellevue, Wash., outside Seattle. "Here in the U.S., we use email and messaging, but the Chinese way, and really for many Asians, is to meet face to face." Tanvi Lad shook off her first game loss and pulled off a rare victory over Rituparna Das in a three-set match and entered the women's singles final of the Manorama-Indian Open National-ranking badminton tournament here on Saturday. Stephen Hawking, the famous scientist who once said intelligent machines could be mankind's biggest threat, opened an artificial intelligence lab in Britain this week to help develop robot surgeons and Terminator-style military droids.

KARLA MURTHY: Hyundai means "modernity," and it's is a big name in the South Korean economic landscape – and not only for cars. Headquartered in the industrialized port city of Ulsan, Hyundai Heavy Industries, or HHI, is the world's largest shipbuilder. It produces engines and construction equipment. This is where they test robots used to assemble cars. KARLA MURTHY: That shake when the robot stops slowed down productivity and accuracy.